Brown must fear a badly timed Chilcot report

Gordon Brown has a habit of upsetting people he’s asked to conduct inquiries.

Adair Turner didn’t look like a man who’d like to take up another commission from Gordon Brown after his pensions inquiry. More recently, Sir Christopher Kelly’s team looking at MPs’ expenses was repeatedly publicly harried by No.10 and didn’t appreciate it.

Gordon Brown punted an unreceipted daily allowance as the answer to the problems in his YouTube address, even though Kelly’s committee had specifically said that wasn’t a good idea.

Mr Brown may be cheesing off another inquiry chairman – Sir John Chilcot. He’s a seasoned ex-mandarin, long-time permanent secretary in Northern Ireland and super discreet.

But one who met him recently tells me that he is “clearly incensed” by the position he has been put in by No.10. The source claims that it is Sir John’s intention to have the public evidence sessions with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown “this autumn” and to publish an interim report “around January/February 2010 at the latest, to avoid being seen as interfering with the general election campaign.

If they were stuck to, those timings couldn’t be much more excrutiating for a government that was hoping there would be private hearings and no report until the other side of the general election.